Leela Chess Zero Blog

Chess.com Computer Chess Championship starts today.

24 engines will participate playing all against all twice, in a double Round Robin tournament with 15 minutes for each player for the game plus 5 seconds per move increment and pondering(thinking in opponent’s time) on. There will be no opening books usage for the 1st round. Every engine will calculate all the moves by itself.
Leela will play on four Tesla V100 GPUs while the other engines on 46 threads of a 2 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8168, 2.70 GHz that has 48 logical cores and 96 threads.

The hardware is very fast, the engines belong to the top ones so the level of play will be amazing.
Every engine will play 46 games so there would be 46 rounds.
After all games are completed, the first 8 of the 24 engines will advance to round 2.

Update

After the restart, the initial training of test20 (from random games) is not working as expected.

Some network properties are not going where we expected them to go (for example, it’s expected that MSE loss would suddenly drop, but it didn’t. Actually, it jumped up instead, can be followed here). Something is wrong with the training, and we are investigating.

As most of you are already aware, Leela will participate in the upcoming season of CCCC!

CCCC (chess.com computer chess competition) is a tournament, where top chess engines compete in a different set of formats, settings and time controls on a high-end hardware. Chess.com did conduct computer chess competitions in the past, but this time CCCC features a really good brand new shiny interface which will make watching it even more fun (and also this is the first time Leela participates there, that also adds fun :-P).

v0.17.0 is out of “release candidate” status, and now is fully released!

Can be downloaded here.

As it has been announced earlier, Leela has a partial endgame tablebase support now.

The support in v0.17.0 is partial only, only WDL tables are probed, but not DTZ. That means, that Leela is only able to query tablebase for positions immediately after captures and pawn moves, and for other positions it has to think by itself.

As you know, we are releasing Lc0 v0.17.0 to participate in the next CCCC (chess.com computer chess competition) season, which will be the first season with a new updated design.
This version has support of pondering and partial support of engdames tablebases, which are going to be useful for CCCC.

The learning rate for the test10 training run has been lowered to 0.0002. Network id 11013 will be the first network trained with the new LR.

This is the last time we lower it for test10 to squeeze some more Elo out of it. It’s expected that the result will be visible within a day or two.

The “Release Candidate 2” for the Lc0 version v0.17 has been published! Available to download here.

We had numerous issues in network encoding in the past, and now after pretty long pause we found yet another one! :)

Turns out, that information about 50-move-no-capture-and-pawn-move-counter was located in wrong place in training data, so networks were trained without that information.

The release candidate of a new version of the Lc0 engine has been released.

v0.17.0-rc1

We expect to have a stable v0.17.0 release in one week, so that we can use it for CCCC. For now you can either help us to find bugs by trying the RC1, or use v0.16 for now.